Assessment Reveals Barriers to Employment in the Valley

YOUNGSTOWN, Ohio – A community needs assessment confirms what business and workforce organizations long believed about the barriers keeping many Mahoning Valley residents from work.

Now the effort to address those barriers begins.

Youngstown Area Goodwill Industries, which is partnering with the Youngstown/Warren Regional Chamber, conducted the community needs assessment over the past few months.

The results of the needs assessment were unveiled at a Chamber Public Policy Conference Friday morning at The Grand Resort Ballroom in Howland.

“I think the report identifies, actually, a spectrum of barriers – from child care, transportation, behavior, health issues, financial literacy issues. There’s quite a range of barriers,” said Guy Coviello, Regional Chamber president and CEO.

The assessment found transportation, child care, mental health and drug test/substance abuse as the top workforce development challenges. Housing is another barrier, and the chamber and Eastgate Regional Council of Governments plan to announce a housing strategy early next year.

“We definitely expected transportation, housing and child care to come in the top, but mental health and substance abuse – it wasn’t that it was surprising – but knowing that it is such a significant need out there,” said Shelley Murray, CEO of Youngstown Area Goodwill Industries. 

Both employers and job seekers identified those as employment challenges, she said.

“Absolutely, the other area – and it’s a smaller population – but it’s our at-risk youth,” Murray said. 

There’s a population of about 1,300 people ages 16 to 19 who aren’t in school, don’t have a high school diploma and aren’t working. 

“It sounds like a small amount now, but if we begin to realize that over multiple years, and that builds, we get to a point where we’re seeing the need in the community now, with poverty and lack of skills and underemployed,” she said. “It all builds on each other to create the situation that we have now that we’re trying to overcome.” 

The chamber has a staff member who will focus on developing a plan, and Goodwill plans to hire someone to do that work.

“We’re going to create those strategies, bring the experts together that can help us be successful at overcoming those barriers,” Coviello said.

Partnerships

By bringing businesses and service providers together, each can learn how others are addressing the needs of their employees to help address barriers, he said.

“There will have to be lots of partnerships coming together around each of these different areas,” Coviello said. 

He listed financial literacy as an example, saying he hears from employers about great employees who one day just stop coming to work.

“And when they dig into it a couple days later, they find out, well, the car broke down,” Coviello said. “There was no money to pay to get the car fixed, so they just stopped coming to work. Some of our employers have put things in place to just pay the bill, and my response has been, well, wait a minute, let’s take it a step further, and with our partners … let’s provide some financial literacy so that you don’t just pay the bill, but you maybe require some sort of financial literacy schooling here.”

That would help prevent similar situations from recurring.

The Youngstown Foundation is providing funding for the work, with financing agreements with other organizations being finalized.

“Goodwill Industries is a critical workforce development partner for us and experts in the field,” Coviello said. “They’re the ones that commissioned the study and made sure that we got all the data that we needed to figure out how to get people off the sidelines into employment. And for the chamber that has thousands of members that are struggling to find employees, this is a perfect solution.”

The assessment determined that the workforce participation rate in the Valley is 57%. The state and national average each stand at 63%.

“That 6% difference represents about 20,000 workers, potential workers, and we have about 12,000 job openings,” he said. “So even if we were able to get half of those 20,000 off the sidelines and into employment, we take a huge strain off of the labor market for our employers and really, really can help turn this economy around faster than it’s already being turned around.”

The next step is to identify businesses and organizations to provide the expertise to help individuals overcome these barriers and to bring employers to the table, Coviello explained. 

Strategic Objective

Murray said Goodwill began this year with the strategic objective to create a community needs assessment.

“We began to invite the community in and just talk to them, show them what Goodwill does, ask them what needs they were seeing and experiencing,” she said. “And we started to hear a lot of the same things, and to be honest, they were bigger than what goodwill was looking to fill in gaps – things like transportation, child care.”

Murray invited Coviello to a tour of the facilities, and she shared what she had been hearing from people in the community. He was hearing about similar challenges.

“I explained that we were looking at doing a community needs assessment, and at that time it was just for Goodwill’s purposes, for us to see, you know, where are gaps that we can help out,” she said. “And through talking with Guy, he’s like, listen, the whole community could use this. And so we said, ‘Let’s do what we can do to help the community.’”

The assessment involved data compiled by Goodwill International, surveys, focus groups and talking to individuals experiencing barriers to employment.

The assessment and the partnership with the chamber to devise a strategy to help overcome barriers fits with Goodwill’s mission and its history of working with people in underserved areas and being an advocate for them, Murray said.

“And so when we’re looking at populations of workers out there that aren’t working, who better than Goodwill and other entities out there that we partner with to come alongside and help them overcome these barriers and really create the solutions that are needed to get individuals to work,” she said.

Pictured at top: Shelley Murray, CEO of Youngstown Area Goodwill Industries, and Guy Coviello, president and CEO of the Youngstown/Warren Regional Chamber.

Copyright 2024 The Business Journal, Youngstown, Ohio.